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2020 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD


SirSmUgly

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1 hour ago, J.T. said:

The correct answer is Alpha Protocol.  I had high hopes for the espionage based RPG but the gameplay looked clunky and the protagonist had the charisma of burnt toast.  Thank God I have resisted the Let's Give It A Chance urge lo these many years. 

 

The game may have sucked, but the concept is still worth exploring.  

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11 hours ago, Smelly McUgly said:

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I can give you a pass since there is at least one horribly bugged game we will all defend to the death.

Mine is VtM: Bloodlines.  A game that was unplayable until the fans made patches for it.

Alpha Protocol sucked eggs though.

Edited by J.T.
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My argument about Alpha Protocol is that it was absolutely a pure RPG. The combat was janky, but acceptable enough at best; the real game was trying to figure out how to manipulate everyone with your responses to get them to do whatever it was that you wanted them to do. 

It embraced the "role-playing" part of RPGs that frankly most modern RPGs are bad at, and it fucking NAILED it. 

But I agree that the combat is disappointing. I just don't care because to me, the real game, and the reason that I played it over and over again, was to see the different ways that I could influence these different players to act and how my influence could completely change the way that part (or all) of the game played out. 

This is why I'm so excited to play Disco Elysium when it comes out on console. I hear that it's got some of those same qualities in terms of being very focused on your dialogue and actually making you care about the role that you want to play and how you present that role through your dialogue choices. 

Edited by Smelly McUgly
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14 hours ago, Smelly McUgly said:

But I agree that the combat is disappointing. I just don't care because to me, the real game, and the reason that I played it over and over again, was to see the different ways that I could influence these different players to act and how my influence could completely change the way that part (or all) of the game played out. 

I can dig that sentiment.  Even though I believe that any spy-fi game should have robust combat in line with the three Bs (Bond, Bourne, Bauer), I do admit that the one of the best things about Mass Effect was being able to see how my dialogue options and gameplay choices affected things later on.

That being said, combat is essential.  On the one hand, you are an operative on the trail of international terrorists and on the other, you are a top level spec-ops commando in the far flung future trying to save the galaxy.  Eventually, you might have to draw your weapon unless the game has the Splinter Cell option where you can achieve the same goal via stealth and firing your gun is actually a bad idea.

Edited by J.T.
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I'm kind of surprised that there wasn't a mass exodus of Kotaku writers.  

 

It seemed like we were headed that way when Gita Jackson and Josh Rivera left in January, complaining that G/O Media wasn't welcoming to women or minorities, and Jason Schreier and some of the other writers either took shots at G/O or had "G/O Union" as their profile pic.

 

But following Megan Greenwell's twitter, I know that, while she and Drew Magary landed on their feet with cushy jobs at Wired and Vice, a lot of their fellow Deadspin writers were struggling to get full time writing gigs after they all resigned.

 

I wonder if that played a part in cowing other writers into staying, knowing that the era of plentiful full time journalism jobs on the Internet are starting to dry up as content providers pivot towards hiring young, cheap talent fresh out of college.

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Very brief rant, but Origin goes down and stays down for long periods of time way too fucking often for a service owned and operated by a company with total assets of over $8 billion. There is no reason for their online infastructure to be so shoddy.

For all the issues you can point to with Steam, the service works.

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1 hour ago, Death From Above said:

Very brief rant, but Origin goes down and stays down for long periods of time way too fucking often for a service owned and operated by a company with total assets of over $8 billion. There is no reason for their online infastructure to be so shoddy.

For all the issues you can point to with Steam, the service works.

It's because everyone went cheap and did bare minimum for infrastructure, along with local municipalities not wanting to deal with companies redoing infrastructure to bring it up to date (mostly due to sweetheart deals with then-local now conglomerate-ly owned cable companies making them the only "broadband" comms game in town), so our overall infrastructure is fucking fucked outside of a major metropolitan area or something within 50 miles of the long hauls.  

But EA being EA, probably went cheap on server location/amount and access circuit bandwidth because they wanted to keep costs down and they only really think that it'll never be really taxed.  Now it's REALLY TAXED all around.

 

One good thing coming out of this whole mess is a LOT of companies are seeing their investment in their communications is piss poor and whoever's still standing will be likely spending money to up their compacity, so as a side effect, we might finally be seeing an overhaul of our nations fucking awful communication framework.

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I just feel like they are clearly behind their own competition at EA. Like, Steam downtime is super-rare. it's not even an exaggeration to say that for every minute of steam downtime I have, there will be 100 on Origin in the same timespan. And granted it's probably a very different setup but when I played Final Fantasy 14 for months, literally the only uncheduled downtime I ever saw was a DDoS attack because Square had their shit together.

I don't really use UPlay or Epic or GOG enough to have a point of comparison for those.

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I've had about 0 issues with Steam.  Their store used to be unusable when the Spring/Winter sales launched, but the launcher itself was never an issue.  I haven't run into any outage time with Origin itself outside of the SimCity debacle.  But then again, I don't use Origin enough and I usually set the Origin games to "work offline" so that outages don't cause issues so long as it's not during that one time a month it needs to authenticate.

 

I do think I've had 1 issue with SimCity over the last 2 years though,

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16 hours ago, Raziel said:

One good thing coming out of this whole mess is a LOT of companies are seeing their investment in their communications is piss poor and whoever's still standing will be likely spending money to up their compacity, so as a side effect, we might finally be seeing an overhaul of our nations fucking awful communication framework.

You may have companies being exposed more and more for their failures but there's no  real regulation to make sure they get together.  As long as Ajit Pai is running FCC nothing's going to be done. Regardless of political affiliation he's been the absolute worst and seems more concerned with having sweetheart deals with conglomerates.  I don't care who takes over but as long as they're at least competent then we may see some actual change.

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Finished/platinum'ed Sleeping Dogs, gonna get to the DLC in time but man, such a fucking fun game. I'd so much rather have more of these than GTA sequels. 

Not sure what's next, definitely something short/indie before another big game. I think I may finally get to Last Or Us, since I've acquired it for free three times now...

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On 4/14/2020 at 12:30 PM, Southside Jim said:

I'm kind of surprised that there wasn't a mass exodus of Kotaku writers.  

 

It seemed like we were headed that way when Gita Jackson and Josh Rivera left in January, complaining that G/O Media wasn't welcoming to women or minorities, and Jason Schreier and some of the other writers either took shots at G/O or had "G/O Union" as their profile pic.

 

But following Megan Greenwell's twitter, I know that, while she and Drew Magary landed on their feet with cushy jobs at Wired and Vice, a lot of their fellow Deadspin writers were struggling to get full time writing gigs after they all resigned.

 

I wonder if that played a part in cowing other writers into staying, knowing that the era of plentiful full time journalism jobs on the Internet are starting to dry up as content providers pivot towards hiring young, cheap talent fresh out of college.

Welp

 

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I bought Ape Escape 2 a few weeks back, and this is a really good fucking game even with the awkward controls. It really goes the extra mile on unlockables.

Sony has done a half-decent job of utilizing their IP. We got a new Everybody's Golf (which was good) and Medievil and SotC remakes, but they could be doing way better. Their publishing ratio of cinematic borefests compared to fun, charming games is still too slanted toward the former. It's time for a new Ape Escape once the PS5 finally hits shelves. 

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Activision just shut off the remaining Transformers servers for PS3 and PS4 without any warning yesterday. So I'm screwed out of getting the Platinum for Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark on PS3.

EDIT: Now I'm screwed out of getting the Platinum in Transformers: Fall of Cybertron on PS4 due to a single player campaign actually being tied to the servers. Great.

Edited by Andrew POE!
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Ok, started playing Fort Triumph (thanks to a friend who sent me money!)

The premise is X-Com meets Dungeons and Dragons and Fire Emblem

https://store.steampowered.com/app/612570/Fort_Triumph/

God, this game is not just tongue in cheek, it's several tongues in cheek. I'm only a couple battles in, but here's some thoughts.

 

The first battle was surprisingly difficult, you only have three heroes (a Paladin, a Rogue, and a Sorceress), and you have to take down about 2-3x that number of Goblins. After that, I freed the fourth character to join my party. The game is really like X-Com, in that it's very grid focused and tactical concerns will be key (for example, a goblin was hiding behind a tree, my Sorceress used a whirlwind to knockdown the tree on said goblin). melee characters can also kick someone a couple squares (which is useful for freeing up your casters, or to kick someone into an obstacle for damage and stuns)

 

Characters with Ranged attacks can overwatch like X-Com, while Melee Characters can brace, and take half damage from attacks. Since you have 3 AP, and most attacks take two AP, you can move a small distance and hit someone. Flanking is important. Apparently we will be recruiting a whole bunch of characters (and yes, the Fire Emblem part is one of the options is PERMADEATH, meaning if your characters die in battle, they die for good. Which could really suck if they've levelled up several times (more stats, more abilities etcetera) But yeah, the game doesn't take it self too seriously. For winning one of the early battles, we get a chest full of beets, which we can eat for XP, or turn into money.. (yes.. BEETCOINS!) . That was ALMOST a pun too far for me.

Almost.

If you're into a fun turnbased game that doesn't take itself seriously (for example, an evil force is plotting a goblin invasion in a tavern, and starts cackling evilly, only to be shushed and pointed to the sign that says "No evil cackling after midnight", you could do a LOT worse than this.

 currently PC only, but planned releases for Switch, PS4 and Xbox 1

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Finished Horizon Zero Dawn and got the platinum. I generally don't care about getting all the trophies, but when I finished the game I only need to knockdown 23 dummies to finish. 

I thought I was special until I found out my son is about to beat Kingdom Hearts again but this time in under 10 hours. Probably 8 hours. And he's doing it without changing any of his gear/armor from the basic equipment. And without using Continues.

Fucking ridiculous.

Back to Dragon Quest XI, with the plan to eventually get to this Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

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Continuing to play retro games more than recent releases.  Currently have 3 retro/classic mini consoles hooked up: NES Classic, SNES Classic, and Sega Genesis Mini.  Loving all three.  Nice to have that much classic Mario goodness in HD.  Super Mario World 2 may be my favorite game ever.

Addicted to Mario Bros. (the original set in sewers), Donkey Kong, DK Jr., and Dynamite Headdy more than I expected.  

Not including Chrono Trigger on the SNES Classic is head-scratching.

Also been playing Alien Hominid and Jojo's Bizarre Adventures.  Alien Hominid is great and will probably motivate me to check out Castle Crashers next week.  Horrible that that game never got a physical release.

Jojo's is the 2d fighter released on Dreamcast and PS1.  I'm playing the Dreamcast.  It's a 2D Capcom fighter from their golden age.  Of course, it's great.

 

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I've spent a ton more time on the Switch. Being temporarily unemployed/quarantined has led me to spend more gaming time than ever before.

Octopath Traveler

This was really good. I hadn't played an rpg in ages and this one hooked me quick. A bit too easy and I always felt like I was over-leveled throughout most of it but still loved the whole the experience. The final secret boss was a huge step-up in challenge though and I made horrible choices when I split my party the first time and just went into like a 2-hour loop with him regenerating those 3 spirits. The next time around I was way more prepared and finished both phases, not without some close calls though and a ton of resurrections. 

FAR Lone Sails

This was really short. Like I finished it in one sitting without ever really getting stuck at any of the puzzles. Looks great, but I'd give this one a pass mainly on the bang-for-buck factor given the length of game.

Unravel Two

I think I enjoyed this more than most. Highly recommended, gorgeous game and it kept me captivated the whole way through. The game itself was also fairly easy but the challenge levels between stages really test you. I had to resort to a Youtube tutorial on one of them ( the barn ). I'd rate this game very highly.

Spirit Hunter NG

Maybe I'm just not into movie/game hybrids? I enjoyed the story surrounding the characters and there were a couple of jump scares that got me really good, but the way the 'action' parts of the game played out didn't hook me and turned it into a bit of a slog. It also didn't help that I didn't realise you could fast forward dialogue/scenes until the last chapter, which made replaying the spirit encounters a real pain.

West of Loathing

I know this has been talked about here before, but this was an awesome game. Played as a bean collector(I think that was the name?) and enjoyed every minute of it. Not sure if there's enough to hook me there for a second playthrough though when I feel like I finished most of what was there.

Currently playing through the Mario Maker 2 story mode and Mark Kart 8 GPs. Not sure what game to start next - I don't really want to jump back into a really long game after finishing Octopath so recently, so I'm thinking maybe Celestle or Candleman.

 

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Y’all got any recommendations for a two player cooperative PS4 games? My wife likes stuff like Harvest Moon but we also play Samurai Warriors and hack-n-slash stuff. More intense strategy/combat stuff probably wouldn’t work.
 

A bit of research turned up Divinity: Original Sin 2, but that might be too involved. A Way Out also looks promising.

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48 minutes ago, Control said:

A Way Out also looks promising.

If you mean couch co-op, then yes I believe that game is a nice option. Another is Until Dawn which can be played with quite a few friends as they can give you instructions when an in-game option appears. 

Edited by LoneWolf&Subs
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